On June 11, 85 Republican Congressmen sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder demanding he investigate alleged attempts to intimidate bloggers called SWAT-ing. This followed a similar letter sent to Holder on June 6 by Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.).
Those letters arose after a "blogblast" on May 25, an event in the blogosphere featuring between 150 and 200 Right Wing bloggers attacking a man named Brett Kimberlin, apparently because he's a thorn in their side. Leading the charge: Michelle Malkin and another blogger, Lee Stranahan.
By June 8, four reports of so-called "SWAT-ing" surfaced, one from Red State Editor Eric Erickson, two from right wing bloggers Pat Frey and Michael Stack -- and one from Kimberlin. Kimberlin is offering a $10,000 reward for information leading to a conviction for any such event -- not just his. SWAT-ing is a false 911 report made from telephones whose numbers were masked, usually by using VoIP lines. VOIP stands for Voice Over Internet Protocol.
Erickson himself says he doesn't suspect Kimberlin of making the calls -- in his piece on the event, he describes it and then says he'd been writing about Kimberlin, leaving the reader to her own imagination. The posting led to a report on CNN in which he positively says he doesn't think Kimberlin made the calls. But the blogs and their comments pages insist otherwise.
The original blogosphere charge: Kimberlin is a dangerous, left-wing terrorist threatening right-wing bloggers for exercising their First Amendment rights. Yet the only substantiated claim they made is that while exercising his own First Amendment rights, Kimberlin had been mean to them; the rest was all about events in 1978. One such blogger claimed he feared Kimberlin so much that he and his family had fled to an undisclosed location from which he bravely continued the fight.
All in all, quite a lot of smoke from the blogosphere. Yet on examination, the entire hoo-hah seems made of whole cloth -- from all appearances, merely a way to hang a false meme of "left-wing terrorist" on Democrats of every stripe and, possibly, attack President Obama.
Choosing Kimberlin, a Washington area progressive activist, was a smart move for his attackers; having served 17 years for the "Speedway Bombings" near Indianapolis in 1978, and for a big pot bust, he's made for the part. Almost every blog post about him includes his 34-year-old mug shot.
On the other hand, he's been charged with no crimes since his release, spending his time running two activist organizations called the Justice Through Music Project (JTMP) and The Velvet Revolution. He was the subject of a book that calls him a con man, and a 2007 Time magazine piece that says he's a complex case.
Some people would say Kimberlin's done a lot of good since he got out of prison. He's a lawyer now, and as the Time piece details, he played a significant role in raising serious questions about the reliability of electronic voting machines, including proving they were easily hacked.
Many of the voting irregularities in Florida during the highly-controversial Bush/Gore presidential election, for instance, were linked to such machines. Similar allegations have been raised about Sen. Chambliss' unexpected victory over then-Sen. Max Cleland, a controversial campaign in which Sen Chambliss questioned the patriotism of Sen. Cleland, who lost both legs and an arm in Vietnam. Sen Chambliss never served thanks to student deferments and bad knees from playing football.
From what I can piece together, Mr. Kimberlin got in the Right's crosshairs with his July 4, 2010 letter to Maryland's Attorney General, Douglas F. Gansler, urging he prosecute James O'Keefe, Hannah Giles, and Andrew Breitbart over O'Keefe's infamous video attacks on ACORN, a community organizing group that collapsed in their wake.
He likewise did nothing to endear the Right by attacking Karl Rove, or, in the company of Common Cause, urging Associate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas be impeached for perjury. (Full disclosure: I worked with Kimberlin in that story.)
But in light of what followed the blogblast, Kimberlin seems to have been a mere stepping stone for the people behind it. On the heels of the June 11 Congressional letter demanding he investigate swatting, Attorney General Holder heard Sen. John Cornyn (R.-TX) join a Republican chorus demanding he resign over his handling of both the so-called "Fast and Furious" matter, and later charges of intelligence leaks from within the Obama administration.
With the two Congressional letters at its back, the Kimberlin affair, tiny as it is, is clearly something that can be magnified beyond recognition and thrown on the pile. So don't touch that dial.
Let's stipulate that Kimberlin is guilty of the deeds that sent him to prison. Nobody's disputing that. But can you point to anything he's done since he was released--provably--that justifies what you say about him? And if not, is your point that you never stop serving your time, that America is not a land of second chances, and that after release, people who have paid their debt to society should just curl up and die? As I say, aside from his past, the main point of his right wing attackers--most of whom have moved on to attacking other targets since the blogblast--is that he's just as aggressive as they are. And if that's the case, maybe they should take a look at themselves, instead of attacking somebody guilty of their own sins. From what I can see, the attacks are all innuendo, basically claiming that since something happened, Kimberlin must be the guilty party. But even Eric Erickson says Kimberlin didn't make the SWATing calls to 911--so what, exactly is Kimblerlin guilty of that leads you to join his attackers? Or are you just the sort of progressive willing to throw anybody under the bus, as long as you're not attacked yourself?
This is an important First Amendment Issue.
The point is that as Americans we don't just support the people we want to hear when they speak out. We are supposed to support the right for all of us to speak out. When an individual tries to stomp on the First Amendment Rights of another individual, then I see this as a problem.
As I said before, you have not examined all of the facts. Thanks, by the way, for throwing me under the bus because I made the statement about an issue that you are not fully informed about.
Tell me, are you the sort of progressive willing to throw anybody under the bus, as long as you're not attacked yourself?
Ya Poop!
You haven't made a single provable claim that Kimberlin's broken any laws since he got out of jail. The worst you can say is that he's made use of the law to annoy people; well, if he'd been out of line, the same law would have slapped him down, so I guess we can move on.
I looked into the claims made about what Kimberlin's supposedly done, and found nothing in them; as I said, based on what was said, the main complaint is apparently that Kimberlin somehow violated the blogblast participants' First Amendment rights in the course of asserting his own, and was mean about it. This seems to be very much like what the Right does to people it doesn't like, so I suppose the real complaint is that you folk can't stand the heat. That's too bad, but you're going to have to learn to take a joke.
In any event, the First Amendment covers government action, not private action; if Kimberlin hit back at people who were attacking him, that's no suppression of First Amendment anything--that's life.
As for throwing you under a bus; I didn't write about you and don't know who you are, so how was that even possible? But thanks for the entertainment.
I really don't care if he's a left-wing activist (I'm pretty leftist myself), this isn't about politics. Brett Kimberlin committed perjury when he was 18 years old. He blew a guy's leg off with explosives (which led to the guy killing himself). He was suspected of murdering a senior lady. He trafficked copious amounts of marijuana and impersonated federal officers. After he's been released from prison he has pursued ridiculous amounts of baseless litigations, tried to frame and threaten people and has again committed perjury. Aaron Walker a.k.a. Aaron Worthing has documented his recent nightmare court story thoroughly on his blog.
Yes, his targets are by and far right-wingers, but if you have any sense of justice, that shouldn't matter one bit here. Brett Kimberlin is not a reformed lefty hero - he's still a complete sociopath and should be treated as such.
That's enough of a path for any good human to follow; even if it means standing up to someone who voices the same opinions as you when they are acting as criminals.
The dude is a monster and we should all run from him.